Poetry Will Change You

The Plato vs. Aristotle Cage Match (part 2)

Artistic recreation of the Plato vs. Aristotle showdown. Photo by Mateusz Wacławek on Unsplash

Dear reader, when last we left you (in last Wednesday’s post), Socrates was about to ostracize the poor poets from all good company in Book X of Plato’s Republic. Socrates, however, concluded by inviting reasoned arguments for the value of poetry, and we have just the man for the job: Plato’s own student, Aristotle.

Has the student become the master?

We may not be sure when we read his opening salvo in Poetics (translated here by James Hutton), which is—um—kind of dry:

The art of poetry, both in its general nature and in its various specific forms, is the subject here proposed for discussion. And with regard to each of the poetic forms, I wish to consider what characteristic effect it has, how its plots should be constructed if the poet’s work is to be good, and also the number and nature of the parts of which the form consists.

*Yawn*

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Oh, excuse me. I dozed off there for a second. Are we sure that we’ve chosen the right champion to fight for us? This is hardly a passionate manifesto. Well, stay with me, but I think that Aristotle is, indeed, up to the task. A couple of important contextual notes before we move on to his arguments:

1. The Poetics is not explicitly a direct response to Plato, so Aristotle is not outwardly arguing against him. However, throughout the treatise, the arguments in favor of the value of poetry seem to respond implicitly to most of Plato’s objections almost point by point.

2. We have only about 20% of Aristotle’s reported works, and the ones that survive seem mostly to be something like lecture notes. Apparently, he did write Platonic-style dialogues, but we don’t have them. As a result, reading Aristotle is generally not as fun as reading Plato.

But yes, despite these caveats, we should stick with him. In fact, Aristotle is so confident here that he doesn’t really even bother to argue. Read that opening again: he does not propose to defend poetry from its attackers; the value of poetry here is simply assumed. He proposes instead to describe and explain what poetry is and how it is constructed. (And if you have read any Aristotle, you know that’s how he rolls, whether he’s writing about poetry, politics, or biology.) However, from his description of poetry and its forms, we can derive arguments that do more than just refute Plato’s attacks. Good poetry can and will transform us, and it can lead us to a greater truth that transcends other forms of discourse.

But notice also how his opening signals an essential methodological and epistemological break with Plato: rather than arguing deductively through a series of questions informed by principles, Aristotle begins with observation and description before proceeding inductively to draw conclusions. This is how we still do things in universities across disciplines: we observe the thing; we analyze the thing; we draw conclusions about the thing based on our observations and analysis. We are all Aristotelians. He’s our Big Papi. (Apologies to David Ortiz.)

Let’s start at the very heart of Plato’s argument in Book X of The Republic: Socrates claims that poetry is a mimetic or imitative art, and, therefore, it cannot show us truth. Aristotle accepts, along with Plato, that poetry, like painting or sculpture, is mimetic, but he goes on to say: “from childhood it is instinctive in human beings to imitate, and man differs from other animals as the most imitative of all and getting his first lessons by imitation, and by instinct also all human beings take pleasure in imitations.”

For Aristotle, then, mimesis is natural, and, furthermore, it is how we learn. Through this natural instinct to imitate and to take pleasure in imitation, human beings are themselves transformed.

They are transformed by the learning process that comes naturally through mimesis, but also through the power of mimetic art to make us feel emotions at one remove. Aristotle points out that while we do not take pleasure in witnessing death or frightening things in real life, we can take pleasure in mimetic representations of these phenomena. What’s more, through this experience we are able to feel aspects of the emotions aroused by death and fear, and this distanced emotional experience helps us to learn and grow. This is what Aristotle means when he famously uses the term catharsis, which literally means a kind of purging or releasing of emotion.

Tragedy, for Aristotle, is the most powerful form of poetry for this reason: it creates the most profound catharsis because it makes us feel pity and terror. In fact, the Poetics focuses almost exclusively on tragedy and epic. At the beginning of the treatise, he promises to move on to comedy later, but this part has apparently been lost. (Scholars in philosophy and Ancient Greek dream of discovering some buried manuscript containing Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy.)

This is one of the results when you search stock photos for “tragedy.” Do you feel the catharsis? I know I do. Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash

OK, but what about Plato’s accusation that mimesis can result only in a pale reflection of the ideal and that it must inevitably take us further from truth rather than closer to it?

Aristotle has an answer to this attack as well. It is subtle and indirect, but it is there in another one of his bland, descriptive sentences—a sentence that just gives us the facts:

Since the poet is an imitator, exactly like a painter or any other maker of images, he must necessarily in every case be imitating one of three objects: things as they once were or now are; or things as people say or suppose they were or are; or things as they ought to be.

It’s in the third and final possibility that the magic happens: “or things as they ought to be.” Plato is wrong: mimesis is not limited to representing our current reality; rather, through the capacity of the human imagination, poetry and art can transcend that reality. It can bring us closer to truth.

Actual photo of Plato, down for the count after his showdown with Aristotle. We must admit that Plato was ripped. Photo by Senad Palic on Unsplash

Aristotle has a lot more to say in the Poetics about how poetry works, the power of diction and metaphor, selection of narrative material, and the shape of a plot. But I think that this is a good place to leave it, because he has, after all, accomplished his assigned task. He has successfully answered the arguments of Plato and has provided us with an aesthetic foundation upon which we can build the entire edifice of literary criticism.

Not bad for a few lecture notes.

But perhaps you disagree? Do you think that Plato’s arguments still stand after this battering? Let me know in the comments.

📺 Programming note: from now on, the Stack of the Week will appear in Sunday’s posts—so stay tuned for that this weekend.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Actual photo of the typewriter that Aristotle used to compose his lecture notes. No need for an ideal form of a typewriter. He just needed a typewriter with all of the necessary parts in good working order. He wrote a lost treatise called “The Parts of the Typewriter,” which was an implicit response to Plato’s lost dialogue, “The Typist.” Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash